The Shapechanger Scenario

by Simon Hawke

  THE

  SHAPECHANGER

  SCENARIO

  PSYCHODROME 2

  Simon Hawke

  Coyright © 1988

  CONTENT

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  EPILOGUE

  DEDICATION

  For Ginjer Buchanan, with thanks

  PROLOGUE

  It's hard enough being a psycho without having a paranoid looking over your shoulder all the time. The paranoid's name was Coles-at least, that was the name I knew him by. He was good. He was so good, he could insinuate himself into my mind without my even knowing he was there. But I was getting better. So far, I'd caught him at it twice. The trouble was, I didn't know how many times I hadn't caught him at it and that was making me paranoid. Of course, professional psychos aren't supposed to let things like that bother them. Amateurs generally don't last long in the high-risk scenarios of Psychodrome. Most of them quit after their first round, assuming they survive it. You either learn fast or you die. Or perhaps you only go insane. It depends on whether you're dealing with something that's real or a programmed hallucination. How do you know? Well, that's just the trouble, you don't. Once the Psychodrome computers start interfacing with your mind, all sorts of strange things start to happen.

  As a pro, I was still fairly new at the game, though after fighting as a corporate mercenary on an undeveloped planet, being stalked by gangsters of the Yakuza in Tokyo, trailed across half the universe by genetically engineered assassins, and almost eaten by an ambimorph on a quarantined world, the novelty was starting to wear a little thin. Not that Coles really gave a damn. You tend not to give a damn when you're one of the people who controls things.

  And Coles controlled a lot of things. At the moment, he was controlling me in a little game that could easily turn deadly and the fact that I had Rudy Breck as backup was no small consolation. Breck used to be a major in the Special Service, or the SS, as they're more commonly called-genetically engineered commandos, created from a matrix of human and animal genetic material, known as hybreeds. Conceived in a Petri dish, raised in a creche, and trained for mayhem from the moment they can crawl. Breck had retired from the service to play Psychodrome professionally. Their loss, my gain. I was starting to lose count of all the times he'd saved my life.

  Breck was supposed to be somewhere close behind me, in position to move in quickly if the bait was taken. Since I was the bait, I would have felt a little more secure if he were close enough for me to see him. For all I knew, he had stopped off somewhere for a drink. That was the trouble with Breck, you could never count on him to react quite the same way a normal human being would. His strength and reflexes were far superior to those of ordinary men, but certain things were missing. Fear, for instance. The instinct for self-preservation was not one of the ingredients that went into an SS hybreed matrix. The emotion of fear and the instinct for self-preservation in the face of danger were entirely lacking in him. With Breck, self-preservation was merely a matter of self-interest, not instinct. A subtle difference, perhaps, but an important one. I was getting knots in my stomach and feeling chills running up and down my spine, but Breck was probably strolling along casually somewhere behind me in this rat's maze of screamers, whistling to himself while he checked out the sights. There were a lot of sights to be checked out on the Lower East Side-or the Downside, as the locals called it-and some of them could be pretty scary. Both the sights and the locals.

  Almost every major city had a neighborhood where only the truly desperate or the seriously crazed ever ventured out at night. On New York City's Downside, it was always night. Sunlight never penetrated down to the lower levels of the city.

  Streetlights provided some illumination and multicolored laser signs strobed over doorways you really wouldn't want to go through unless you were a twist, but mostly, there were small pools of light around the street lamps surrounded by large areas of shadow through which people moved like scuttlefish. Jack the Ripper would have felt very much at home here.

  I'd spent a few years on the Ginza Strip of Tokyo and I'd also seen the ground level of that city, a squalid, ugly, fearsome warren known as Junktown. I had even spent some time in Tokyo's Combat Zone, a place so wild and depraved that it had been sealed off to keep the screamers in. The seamy side of life was nothing new to me, so the prickly feeling at the back of my neck wasn't just a sense of apprehension at being in a nasty neighborhood. It was the certain feeling that I was being stalked.

  I was moving through a ghetto teeming with all sorts of predators. That would have made the stalker difficult to spot in any case, but there was a good chance that this stalker was an ambimorph, which meant he would be impossible to spot until he-or it, since shapechangers do not have gender-was right on top of me.

  I could imagine people tuning in right now, coming home from work and turning on their psy-fi sets, plugging into the net and selecting a vicarious adventure from any one of dozens that Psychodrome was running-maybe even mine-and for a while, they'd be able to tune into one-way telempathic contact with a psycho star and experience a fantasy.

  I thought of Stone, who had once performed on the lust channels because she was turned on by the idea of having sex with billions of people at the same time. The thrill had eventually worn off and she had switched to high-risk game scenarios, searching for a stronger fix. She never really knew what she was looking for. For a while, she thought it might be me, but she had died before she could find out for sure. I wondered if the same thing that had killed her was now stalking me.

  The home audience sharing my experience was getting a good heady dose of sudden fear and an adrenaline rush-emotions and reactions that were modulated carefully by the fail-safe biofeedback sensors on their psych-fidelity sets. It wouldn't do to give some excitable old fart a coronary just because my heart was pounding like a trip hammer. For them, it was all show. Shared perceptions with cybernetic safeguards. For me, it was the real thing.

  "Coles?" I said.

  He could hear me back at Game Control, but the home audience would never hear me say his name. That was because the home audience only knew about the surface levels of the game. They did not suspect that they were much more than spectators. In a way, they were participants, only they didn't even know it. So far as the home audience was concerned, Coles did not even exist. So far as Psychodrome International, Inc., was concerned, Coles did not exist. So far as every government agency you could reach through normal channels was concerned, Coles did not exist. Sometimes I wondered if even Coles knew he existed, if he actually saw a reflection when he looked into a mirror. In any case, he apparently did not exist for me right at that moment, because there was no answer. Perhaps he wasn't there. Perhaps he wasn't as omnipotent as he often seemed. Or perhaps he simply didn't want to talk to me.

  "Coles, damn it . . ."

  I wished I knew where Breck was. I hoped to hell he was somewhere close. Real close. I felt as if crosshairs were centering on the back of my neck. I had that feeling you get sometimes when someone is staring at you intently across a crowded room. You sense it somehow and you turn, your eyes meet . . .

  Yellow eyes. Red-flecked, yellow eyes with vertically slit pupils. Iridescent snakeskin stretched taut across high cheekbones. Upper lip protruding slightly over modified incisors. Tall, spikey crest of feathery white hair streaked with silver, ending in a long pony tail cascading down the back. Sleek, black, metal-studded skinjac with chain-mail epaulets; s
ilver and black lycras and black, high-heeled boots. A cyberpunk. But unlike most of them, whose biomods were merely artifice- trendy weekend monster makeup easily removed when it was time to go to work-this one had gone the hardcore route with cosmetic surgery. They called it getting "hardwired." He grinned at me and gleaming alloy hydraulic fangs slid out of his two large, hollowed-out incisors.

  Was this an ambimorph I was confronting or was it only some hardcore kid looking to finance his next score? Either one was dangerous, it was just a matter of degree. The safest thing would be to frag the punk, whether he was an ambimorph or not, but Coles wanted a live shapechanger. And that meant there was a good chance he'd wind up with a dead psycho- namely one Arkady O'Toole, yet another casualty of the ratings war.

  The cyberpunk and I stared at each other like two competing predators circling before a fight for turf. Neither of us moved as the sea of people flowed around us. I couldn't see Breck anywhere, but I spotted two more cyberpunks slowly closing in from my left and right. One had himself done up as a pussycat, complete with lion's mane and whiskers; the other one looked like something you'd find on a used cyborg lot. Maybe all three were no more than what they appeared to be, but maybe one of them was a shapechanger who, in his cyberpunk disguise, had joined up with a couple of wild boys to take me out. Either way, I was in trouble. Snakeskin started to move toward me through the crowd, his hands in the pockets of his skinjac. I didn't think he was just trying to keep them warm.

  I ducked down into a-stairwell leading to a doorway below the sidewalk level. A laser sign over the entrance depicting a writhing double helix alternately flashing blue and purple read, "Blue Genes." I paid the cover and walked into a wall of sound.

  A band up on the small stage was filling the club with enough volume to poleax an elephant. The lead singer was snarling through an implanted vocoder throat mike, rhyming "insect eyes" with "mesmerize." I didn't catch the rest of the lyrics. They would have been difficult to understand in any case, since the band's sound engineer chose that moment to switch the singer's throat mike from multiplex-overlay human mode to something that sounded like a mosquito big enough to eat the Bronx.

  The rest of the band was pounding out a driving beat that sounded like the screaming inner workings of a giant machine about to explode. The musicians were shirtless, their fingers dancing over keyboards that were hardwired into the puckered, livid white skin of their skinny chests. In addition to getting themselves hardwired for sound, cyberpunk musicians often spent the extra money to hook up their instruments to their pleasure/pain centers as well, obviating the necessity for drugs by giving themselves the ability to orchestrate their own highs. It gave a whole new meaning to the phrase, "playing with yourself."

  I threaded my way through the undulating bodies on the dance floor, looking for the back way out. I figured it would be behind the stage, where the musicians changed and the bar took its deliveries. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Snake-skin moving through the crowd, looking for me.

  I spotted a door in the back, near the stage, marked "Employees Only." A muscular young man with red and black hair leaned against the wall beside the door. He was dressed in skintight orange and black lycras with a flame pattern. His head was nodding slightly in time to the music. He spotted me heading toward the door and stood in front of me, blocking my way with a hand on my chest. I didn't have time to argue with him and the music was too loud in any case, so I grabbed his arm, spun him around, and slammed him against the door, using his body to push it open. Once inside, I shoved him into a pile of boxes and made for the back door that led into the alleyway behind the club.

  I kicked the door open and bolted out into the alley, straight into the arms of the other two cyberpunks. The door behind me opened once again and Snakeskin came out into the dark alley. They'd suckered me. Snakeskin had followed me into the club while the other two had cut around the back. They proceeded to slam me against the building wall a few times to take some of the fight out of me. Snakeskin grinned, opening his mouth and hissing like a cobra, teeth bared. His trick fangs slid out again, curved and-needle-sharp.

  I didn't know where the hell Breck was and I didn't have time to worry about it. There's only one thing to do when the odds are against you and you can't run away. Attack and attack hard. Of course, running away was vastly preferable, but the cyberpunks had me by both arms and they showed no inclination to let go. I leaned back against them suddenly, kicked out, and caught Snakeskin under the jaw with my right foot. His teeth clicked together and he fell back, blood streaming from his mouth where his alloy snake fangs had impaled his lower lip.

  The cyberpunks who held me recovered quickly and ran me at the wall. I barely had enough time to turn my face aside before they slammed me against the brick. It felt like doing a belly flop into a swimming pool that had no water in it.

  I was so scared, I didn't think about how much it hurt. I only knew that if I didn't do something drastic right away, it was going to hurt much worse. They yanked me back and ran me at the wall again. I leaned back against them at the last minute and ran two steps up the wall, flipping over backward to land behind them. It actually worked and they lost their grip on me. Unfortunately, unlike all the swashbuckling heroes who always land on their feet after trying such stunts, I went over backward and fell right on my ass.

  I rolled and clawed my gun out of its holster underneath my jacket. To hell with Coles and his bring-'em-back-alive instructions. My first shot went wild, whining off somewhere down the alley, but my second one struck one of the punks right in the chest, exploding on penetration and making salsa out of his entire upper torso. I missed with my third shot and the other punk took off down the alley. I got to my feet, aimed carefully, and squeezed off another round. It caught him in the back and he went down.

  Then I heard something move behind me. I spun around, saw Snakeskin lunging at me, and fired. The bullet hit the wall behind him and exploded. Suddenly he wasn't there anymore. He had simply disappeared.

  For a moment, it didn't sink in. I stood there in a daze, staring at the spot where he had been a second earlier. Then I realized he must have shapechanged and even as I realized that, I felt something wind itself around my legs.

  I looked down and saw the head of the cyberpunk on the body of a serpent thicker than my thigh winding rapidly around my legs, climbing up my body. I froze with horror and then my arms were pinned against my sides, the coils crushing me, the head with its obscene travesty of a human face drawn back, fangs gleaming, dripping poison-

  I screamed.

  "No, no, no'." said Coles, bending over me and grasping me by the shirtfront, shaking me.

  I was still screaming. He slapped me twice across the face, hard enough to make my head ring, but it had the desired effect of snapping me out of it.

  "You froze'." said Coles. "You panicked!"

  I gasped, trying to stop hyperventilating. My heart was beating like a wild thing trying to claw its way out of my chest. The scan crew was anxiously monitoring my readouts. They could have helped by inducing a calming alpha state, but Coles wasn't going to let me off the hook that easily.

  "You panicked and you died!" said Coles, grabbing me by the shirtfront and shaking me again, lifting me half off the laboratory couch. He grimaced in disgust and let me go. "Damn you, O'Toole, you're going to be no use to me at all if you panic at the slightest provocation!"

  I stared at the son of a bitch, hating him.

  "Mistake number one," he said, ticking them off on his fingers, "you ducked into that club, putting yourself on the defensive and giving the initiative away. Mistake number two, you failed to take advantage of the people in the club to outflank the opposition. Instead, you continued to retreat, continued to remain on the defensive, and you ran right into a trap. Mistake number three, you caved in to pressure and disregarded my instructions by shooting to kill. Mistake number four, you allowed your emotions to overwhelm you and you left yourself exposed. Mistake number five, you hesi
tated when the cyberpunk shapechanged, a mistake you compounded by freezing when you saw the snake climbing up your legs, thereby giving it enough time to pin your arms. And any chance you might have had left then, you simply threw away by giving in to terror. How many times do I have to tell you? You go on the defensive, you lose the initiative and give up half the battle. You panic, you die."

  "Sir," said one of the technicians on the scan team, "the subject's blood pressure is dangerously high. We're registering critical stress levels. I urgently recommend that he be taken down before-"

  "Hell, do whatever you want," said Coles impatiently, dismissing me with an irate gesture. "By all means, put him on downtime before he self-destructs. I've got no use for him the way he is right now."

  They started bringing me down even before he finished speaking and Coles slowly receded into a dim haze as they eased me into downtime, turning off my mind before it built up a critical mass of stress and started a chain reaction of delusions no one could control. The last conscious thought I had before I drifted off into limbo was that it might be nice if they just left me there, suspended in a thoughtless, dreamless, nearly lifeless state, where neither reality nor nightmare could intrude. Perhaps deep down, that's what every psycho really wants.

  ONE

  "I heard you died," said Breck, laconically.

  He stood looking down at me with a wry smile, his flaxen blond hair in disarray. The cracked-ice intensity of his blue eyes was heightened by his use of bang, a hybrid plant developed from a mutated strain of noncarcinogenic tobacco and an offworld herb called bangalla. Smoking it had the effect of stimulating adrenaline production, increasing visual acuity, and amplifying tactile perceptions. Smoking bang would make an ordinary human being burn out and self-destruct, but then Breck wasn't an ordinary human being. Prolonged use of bang also had the curious side effect of making the eyes lambent. With Breck, whose hybreed matrix gave him cat's eyes to begin with, it had the disconcerting effect of making his eyes strobe when the light hit them just right.